I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University.

Unfortunately when we were acquired by HP they already had a workflow product (Process Manager Interactive). The decision was taken to stop OPENflow and that was essentially that. (It was also the point that HP Middleware, a predominately Java-based division, decided to mothball our C++ transaction service.) But even today OPENflow offers capabilities that modern equivalents could benefit from. Quite a few capabilities to be perfectly honest. I think it's time to revisit past decisions and re-learn forgotten techniques!

Now what makes me write about this again, when it's old hat? Well Jim's written a nice piece on coupling and cohesion. It's worth a read, but what prompted me to add this entry wasn't the subject itself but the fact that it references Pete Lee. As with Jim, Pete was one of my undergraduate teachers and took me through two years of software engineering. And it was this course that first brought loose coupling and cohesion (and many other things) to my attention. When I was preparing my presentation for the winter school I wanted to pull some specific references from the software engineering book we used during that undergraduate course, but it's stuck up in the loft and I was too lazy to go and find it. It's been over 20 years since I last saw it, but I'm pretty sure it was the first edition of Ian Sommeville's excellent book. Maybe time to buy the latest edition!

It's a bit late, but here's a quick summary of QCon London 2008. Although I've been an InfoQ editor for a couple of years, this was my first time at a QCon and I was impressed. The presentations I saw were all packed and technically very good: there was none of the "product placement" that you tend to see more and more at conferences. Even the vendor pavilion was less of a car salesroom and more another opportunity to share technical discussions. I was impressed.

I jumped across the tracks during the days I wasn't presenting. However, on the Thursday I stayed with my track. Given what I'd heard about the same track at the last QCon, I was expecting a lot of controversy. However, this time I think the community has moved on and accepted that one size doesn't fit all, which coincidentally was the subject of my presentation. The entire day of the track went well and I thought all of the presentations came together very cohesively.

It's been really difficult to find the time and the weather to go diving. With the 6 month clock ticking, we finally bit the bullet and got wet. The weather wasn't great, so we opted for Ellerton again. Although my dive computer said it was 9C certain parts of my body registered much lower! Whereas others were diving in dry suits, we were roughing it in our 5mm wet suits. We managed to get nearly an hour dive time despite the temperature. And I'm sure my hands were blue when I started!

I love diving for a number of reasons. Not least of which is the silence and ability to think about things while I'm down there. I managed to resolve a few issues I haven't been able to get to during my normal working day and a couple of new blog entries will be coming as a direct result. Now it had better not be another 6 months before my next dive!